caucus

Cowboy caucusing

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

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It’s caucus day in Wyoming, which is one of the boxy Rocky Mountain states without a well-known film festival to bring in celebrities and news cameras. If you’ve never heard of it, Wyoming is the real purrty place that lives right below Montana. If you’ve never heard of Montana, it’s the real purrty place that lives right under Canada. If you’ve never heard of Canada, it’s the real purrty suburb to the world! Anyway, Democrats are swarming the polls in Wyoming today. According to Yahoo news: “In 2004, 675 people statewide took part in the Wyoming caucuses. In Sweetwater County today, more than 500 people crowded into a high school auditorium and another 500 were lined up to get inside. ‘I’m worried about where we’re going to put them all. But I guess everybody’s got the same problem,’ said Joyce Corcoran, a local party official. ‘So far we’re OK. But, man, they keep coming.’”

This historic swarming of people to the polls is the problem the Democratic party will face when it comes time to take official tally of the superdelegate vote. We commoner voters are invested in this primary in a way Democratic primary voters have never been invested before and in a way the machinery of the Democratic Party surely did not take into account as it developed the superdelegate system back in the 1980s. The result seems to be that if the party fails to be seen as embracing the “will of the people” in choosing its presidential nominee, it risks turning off completely all of the first-time voters who have thronged to the polls this year— the famously formerly “apathetic” young voters and minority voters who together will go a long way to putting a Democrat in the White House in the fall. We all have faith in the process on some level now. The risk of dashing that new-found hard-won faith on the rocks of party machinery could be catastrophic. Yes, by that we mean a de facto extension of the Bush years, which has become the very definition of catastrophe! Democratic Party Chairmen Howard Dean, whaddya gonna do?

Flickr of Laramie, Wyoming: Kdriese

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Super caucus site, CO

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

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Tonight I went to the “super caucus site” at the Boulder, Colorado, public high school, where something like 15 precincts were scheduled to gather and decide which of the Democratic candidates they would support at the Democratic convention in August. Four years ago roughly 200 people turned out to caucus. Tonight authorities presumed that number would at least double, so they were prepared for roughly 500 neighborhood Boulder Democrats to show up. They opened up the auditorium balconies and spread out five tables in the school lobby to register the crowd. At 7:00 pm, though, an hour after the doors opened, the full auditorium was standing room only, people were crushed into the lobby and lines were streaming out of the open doors down the sidewalks. Police were reportedly redirecting traffic on the street.

“We’re estimating about 2000 people are here tonight to caucus,” said a bearded emcee on the stage, but he was immediately drown out by clapping and foot stomping. “There are more than 2000 people here. It’s really something. It’s really emotional for those of us who have been doing this a while—”

Three Boulder High kids meanwhile were working the auditorium sound-board in the middle of the room, providing a low-level Bob Marley background thrum for the pre-event. I remember when we used to sit / In a government yard in Trenchtown… / No, woman, no cry / No, woman, no cry.

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Forest Whitaker is so excited

Monday, February 4th, 2008

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Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker rallied Obama supporters today in Boulder, Colorado, speaking first with faculty and students at the University of Colorado campus and then with what was referred to last election as a crowd of “chardonnay-and-brie liberal” townies at the Dairy Art Center.

Taking in the high-end ethnic mix demographic at the Dairy Center—all different faces but similar eye-ware, the crowd as one smiling hopefully, taking turns talking casually with Forest Whitaker about Obama-style change— all of it kept stirring up in my head something Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the New York Times Sunday about Obama-mania in California: “Movements are great… but they don’t always translate.” Smart successful Boulder people and Hollywood stars do not a representative slice of America make.

Still, there were a lot of people in the small gallery space, maybe 250 people, all of them registered, all of them fired up and ready to caucus tomorrow. When Lauren Dula got up on a fashionable hunk of poured concrete to speak to the crowd, she gave very practical advice. “Get to the caucus early. If you don’t know your caucus location, there are two staffers with laptops in the corner there— Hi Tom! Hi Diane!— they’ll tell you where you have to go… This is really the first time Colorado will have a voice in the nomination process. There has been an historical average of eight people per location at all previous caucuses. You can bet it won’t be that way tomorrow. There will be lines. It will be crowded.”

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Obama, Huckabee and the kids

Friday, January 4th, 2008

The message last night in Iowa was a clear: Please let’s change the whole mess up!

Sounding the opening bell on the 2008 elections, caucus-goers voted overwhelmingly for a first-term African-American senator on the left and an anti-BigMoney governor on the right. Key to the victories of both men was the mad increase in participation of young voters. The numbers are amazing. You know the way it sounds when someone sits down next to you somewhere and is moving to the music in their headphones and you think Yeah that sounds pretty good and then they let you have a listen and it’s more than good, it’s banging— well that sound is how the numbers look.

Youth turnout rate nearly tripled this time around, going from 4 percent in 2004 to 11 percent last night. Young voters supported both winners by the largest margins of any age group. According to a CNN poll, among 17-to-29-year-old Democrats, 57 percent supported Barack Obama; among 17-to-29-year-old Republicans, 40 percent supported Mike Huckabee. What’s more, the percentage of Democratic caucus-goers under the age of 30 (22 percent) was greater than the percentage of people under 30 who live in Iowa (21 percent). All of which reflects national trends noted since 2000. Since then and before last night, 6.2 million new voters under 30 years of age had cast ballots. And this year, 44 million Americans under 30 will be eligible to vote, more than one-fifth of all U.S. voters.

Was Obama right to target the much maligned “apathetic” youth? Oh yes he was. He got the youth vote and he got the woman vote and he got the white vote. In a 95 percent white state, Obama killed. He didn’t do it alone, of course, and it couldn’t have hurt that the man nailed this last of his caucus ads, hitting the two-minute mark exactly. Swish and the buzzer!

Addition: For anecdotal reporting on what went on inside the caucuses, ie, more about the youth takeover, read these three quick Salon dispatches.

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Caucus crazy

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Evidence suggests that peer-to-peer voter turnout campaigns work to significantly mobilize young voters. For any of you Iowans who haven’t yet been successfully peer-to-peered, Rock the Vote and its smackdown partner are posting some motivational PSAs and trivia quizzes that are kinda funny. So rock your caucus, people, because caucusing means working for change!

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